One of the best perks of being a Seattle Public Library member is a service called Your Next 5 Books. Fill out a form, describe some favorite books and authors and what you’re in the mood for, and you get a response—with not only five suggestions, but also reasons why the library’s team of recommenders thinks you’ll enjoy them. It lightens the cognitive load of choosing what to read, and you end up with some works you would never have found on your own. It’s a bit like an amazingly well-read friend handing you a couple of books saying, Here, you’ll like these.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were something like this to help you decide what to eat? I mean, sweet Jesus, outside of a few takeout breaks, many of us are about to have cooked 365 dinners in a row. Even me, the guy who thinks about kitchen gear and tests recipes all day, then climbs into bed with a cookbook for some soothing pre-snooze reading—I’m tired of cooking. More specifically, I’m tired of figuring out what to eat.
That “what-to-cook” cognitive load is real. It’s a lot of work when you do it week after week. Plus, in this age of trying to keep our grocery shopping to a minimum, you need to get multiple meals worth of food on every store run. It means something simple but daunting: You need a meal plan. To do this, you can get more screen time and swan around online looking for recipes. You could pull down a few favorite cookbooks from your shelves, or head to the grocery store and see which frozen foods call your name.
By chance, I found some relief in an unlikely spot a few months back on Ends + Stems, an online subscription service devoted to creating meal plans that cut down on food waste. Somewhere around that time, thanks to a cheddar scallion dip recipe from Melissa Clark, I also discovered the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter from The New York Times. It proposes a mix of dinners for each week and can also be found on a full page of the physical paper, tucked into the At Home section, where it’s called “Five Dishes to Cook This Week.”
My wife Elisabeth and I had gone up to see her mom in Vancouver for several weeks in October, and on the kitchen table was a stack of the “Five Dishes” pages cut from the paper, waiting to be cooked. We dabbled with them a bit while we were up there, but back at home in Seattle, the practicality of it really kicked in; the days were short, the country was in turmoil, and my attention span was … was I saying something?
I started in earnest with the December 20th issue, with a work week’s worth of dishes that felt both familiar and comforting, food like broiled salmon with herbs and chicken with green olives, along with ideas that gave me the opportunity to learn a few new tricks, starting with Andrea Nguyen’s umami garlic noodles with mustard greens. I never cook with mustard greens, and here they were, folded into Japanese ramen with an intriguing sauce made with cornstarch, MSG, sugar, oyster sauce, and a bit of cooking water from the noodles. The dish had a pleasingly high enjoyment-to-effort ratio. The next night we chopped a kabocha squash into bite-sized pieces, sautéed it, then braised it in half a cup of stock. (Side note: Did you know kabocha squash skin is edible? I did not! Total time saver.) The recipe, from Cynthia Chen McTernan, ends up with the broth softening the sharp corners of the squash and cooking down to a sort of sauce. Sprinkle chopped scallions on top and you’re done. I ended up eating it as a cold midnight snack once or twice, topping it with a squirt of gochujang, an accidental, sublime pairing.
Daily Specials
Five Weeknight Dishes started in late 2018 as a newsletter run by Emily Weinstein, deputy food editor at The New York Times and editor of NYT Cooking. Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2020, commonly known in my household as the Early Covid Era, the newsletter saw a 300 percent increase in subscribers.
These were easy recipes, not all-day affairs, though turning the Italian wedding soup with turkey meatballs recipe into dinner for two on Christmas Eve was an easy choice: fancy and festive and just different enough to feel special.
After a dedicated week, we were becoming fast converts. I loved the ability to sit and write out the grocery list in one go, keeping Covid shopping time to a minimum. Shop once and you’re set. I learned to front-load the more perishable food earlier in the week and our lunches got better with lots of tasty leftovers. The following week started with a deeply flavored vegan puttanesca soup, then veered into quirky fun with a recipe for berry jam fried chicken. In it, breast cutlets marinate in a bath of fruit jam, egg, and balsamic vinegar, then those boneless and relatively flat pieces are breaded and can fry in just an inch of oil, turning weekend-project type food into weeknight fun. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, we made the Pati Jinich recipe for bricklayer-style nachos, opened a bottle of cider from my neighborhood wine shop, Vino Vertié, and called it a year.
There were plenty of takeaways from cooking like this, but during this time of pandemic and governmental upheaval, the big one was how much this method lightened a load. There was no weekly (or nightly) meal-planning angst, no being out of key ingredients, no extra trips to the store. Mostly, I’d just make that shopping list on Sunday (the day the new set comes out) and shop on Monday. Plus, with tested recipes from a trusted source, instead of casting myself into the wilds of the internet, I knew they’d be easy to follow and taste good.
Happy Meals
The shift here is huge and fantastic. Going into a third week with it, Elisabeth pulled “Five Dishes” out of the At Home section and we realized we’d gone from, “Shit! What are we going to cook on Monday?” and “Shit! What are we going to make for dinner on Tuesday?” to an excited “Ooh! What are we making this week?” It’s also worth noting that none of this was particularly expensive. It’s hard to make a direct comparison, but I certainly wasn’t spending more on food that I would have if left to my own devices.
I sped through more, making cookbook author Meera Sodha’s cauliflower, cashew, and coconut curry from her Made in India cookbook and adapted for “Five Dishes.” I substituted black cod (aka sablefish) for salmon in a broiler special with a mint butter and orange zest to spectacular effect, and finished out with Aaron Hutcherson’s baked spinach and artichoke pasta, a divine sort of adult mac and cheese.
The hits kept coming every Sunday, flowing along with the seasons and the kinds of food we crave at that time of year, something that Ends + Stems also does well. If you’re looking for a cookbook where they’ve thought this seasonal idea through, you can try Meike Peters’ 2019 cookbook, 365, which breaks the year into weeks. If you’ve got a bit more energy, you can also just work your way through an entire cookbook, and for this I’d recommend Hugh Acheson’s How To Cook, for some excellent basics, or try Meera Sodha’s new book East for fantastic vegan and vegetarian food from Asia.
Really, though, do what you have the energy to do. Right now, it’s OK to take the easiest path forward. For me, that’s “Five Dishes,” where I get great food, novelty, variety, and my meal plan all in one place. Like my favorite Seattle Public Library program, “Five Dishes” offers variety and vetting—a guarantee that you’ll eat well. Here, it seems to say, You’ll like these.
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